Message-Id: <199505021423.JAA18205@aleta.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 09:27:01 -0500
To: kevinh@eit.com, Multiple recipients of list <www-html@www10.w3.org>
From: young@cs.purdue.edu (Michal Young)
Subject: Parsability (re: Thinking about style sheets)
> Hakon's format is broken into manageable, logical chunks
> that allow for extensibility and ease of parsing.
Although these examples look more human-readable than the lisp-like syntax
of a previous dssl-lite proposal, it seems to be a step backward in
extensibility and ease of parsing. Is there some core grammar of which all
these examples are just variations? If not, there should be, and there
should be a very clear demarcation of a kernel long-lived style sheet
language from a set of particular facilities that match contemporary DTP.
For example, attributes of the form foo.bar.whatever are part of the core
language, the specific drop-cap attribute is not. In other words, design
for change (and not just for additions).
>We should be seeing a full description of the experimental notation,
>with proposals, etc. and a full listing of properties, values,
>meta-variables, etc. on the Web pretty soon.
With a simple (LL(1) or LR(0)) grammar for the kernel, I hope, and a clear
division between kernel and a set of facilities that can be described by
phrases in the kernel language.
-Michal
----------------------
Michal Young
Purdue University
Software Engineering Research Center
Department of Computer Sciences
1398 Computer Science Building
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398
voice: 317-494-6023
fax: 317-494-0739
URL: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/young
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